Transcript: Trump Press Sec Fawning
Takes Bizarre Turn as Polls Worsen
As Karoline Leavitt unleashes some of
her most obsequious flattery of Trump yet, the author of a new analysis of
Trump’s sliding numbers explains why his coalition is collapsing—and how Dems
should exploit it.
Greg
Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The
New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your
host, Greg Sargent.
We
don’t think it’s really sunken in with people just how badly President Trump is
doing in the polls right now. He is deeply underwater on every major issue. And
in another data point, new Gallup numbers show party identification among
Democrats rising and among Republicans falling. Trump’s political situation is
very precarious. The fate of many of these trade deals is up in the air.
Inflation just rose again by a key metric. And Trump just had a terrible
day in an appeals court where judges were skeptical of the legality of his
tariffs. We don’t know for sure that those will even hold up.
We
can always tell when Trump is in a shaky situation when press secretary
Karoline Leavitt rushes in to praise him with
absurdly over-the-top, obsequious flattery—and boy, did she not disappoint this
time. Today we’re talking about all this with New Republic senior
editor Alex Shephard, who has a great new piece taking
stock of Trump’s overall cratering in polls across the board. Thanks for coming
on, Alex.
Alex
Shephard: It’s great to be back.
Sargent: So Alex, let’s quickly take stock of the situation. The
consumer price index is up again—up 2.6 percent from a year earlier. Some headlines: New
York Times, “Key Inflation Measure Rose in June”; ABC News, similar,
“A key US inflation gauge rose last month as Trump’s tariffs lifted goods
prices.” He’s out there tweeting like crazy that this country is hot right now
and that we’re getting rich off his tariffs. But things are very shaky for him
right now. What’s your overall reading?
Shephard: Yeah. For the last month or so, I’ve been looking at his
steady dip in the polls as analogous to what happened to Joe Biden after the
withdrawal from Afghanistan—the moment where the coalition that got him
elected breaks up and where you’re basically left with die-hards and true
believers. And I think that one of the things that really jumped out to me in
recent polling is this idea that the emerging MAGA majority that Trump had
really pushed after winning reelection [is] completely gone now, basically. His
status with Black voters has always been overstated. He only won about 15
percent of the vote—it was a big deal because he doubled
what he had done in 2020. But his disapproval rating among Black voters is up
to 72 percent. Those numbers are similar among young voters. With voters under
30, he was running even, which is pretty crazy for a Republican president, in
January. He’s now 30 points underwater. And there’s just nothing you can see
here where that’s going to change.
And
I think the other big change here is new polling is pointing to the fact
that Trump ran even with Latino voters in 2024. He won, I think, 48 percent of
the vote, which, again, is a huge number for a Republican candidate. But
basically on immigration alone, those numbers are starting to shift. You’re
seeing two-thirds of Latino voters turn on the president based almost solely on
his immigration policies. And that’s not, again, factoring into the fact that
as Trump brags about raking in $150 billion in tariffs, that’s a tax on
American citizens, right? Everyone is seeing prices go up. The level of
dissatisfaction is high. It’s growing. And I think, again, people are going to
look at the early part of July as the turning point in this presidency. It’s
the combination of the bill, the effective tariffs starting to take hold, and
the Epstein stuff, which he has not been able to control and has made worse at
every opportunity.
Sargent: Alex, let me throw this in there. Gallup just found that
Trump’s overall approval among independents is 29 percent. So we’re really
seeing his coalition fall apart across the board, aren’t we?
Shephard: Yeah. And again, you saw this in basically 2016 and 2024.
Trump won because of his standing with independent voters who decided that they
could put up with some of the craziness because they were either tired with
establishment Democrats or they just wanted to break the mold of American
politics. And again, that is all reverberating back. The other thing too is,
I’ve been talking to a lot of Democratic strategists who I think are rightly
angsty about the party’s standing with voters heading into the midterm
elections—and they should be. I think the Democratic electorate is pretty
furious with their leadership, and a lot of that is justified. But you
mentioned earlier the rise in registration, and I think what we’re seeing here
too is Democrats have an existential problem that they need to sort
out—but they’re not going to be punished for it in the polls. Right now people
are so disgusted with this administration that they’re looking for any
opportunity or any alternative, and Democrats are going to provide that.
Sargent: A hundred percent. And now let’s use that as the setup to
listen to good old White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt. She read from
a pre-written statement. Listen to this.
Karoline
Leavitt (audio voiceover): The
president has now ended conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia, Israel and
Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Pakistan,
Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia. This means President Trump has
brokered, on average, about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his
six months in office. It’s well past time that President Trump was awarded the
Nobel Peace Prize.
Sargent: So there are a lot of problems with this rant. Many of
these conflicts aren’t at all over. But the really glaring thing is the single
biggest promise of peace Trump made is an utter buffoonish failure. He said
he’d end the Russia-Ukraine war in one day. In reality, he’s been badly
humiliated by Putin and clearly doesn’t know what the hell to do. I think
that’s another reason he’s in trouble in the polls because that whole thing
really just tore the clothing off the emperor rather brutally. Alex, you
want to take a crack at her strange monologue there?
Shephard: Yeah. I think we’ll finish where you started, which
is with the outstanding conflicts—or the ones that weren’t mentioned. I think
in general what you’re seeing are, yes, a bunch of conflicts that have erupted
over the last six months, but the Trump administration’s role in them has
either been minimal or, in some cases, very self-serving. So you’ve got
this border conflict between Thailand and Cambodia, which just ended
thanks in part to a call from the president who was threatening to withhold new
trade deals if they didn’t get their act together. But the irony of reclaiming
this today is that Thailand and Cambodia just reaffirmed their peace deal in
China yesterday. It’s not like the U.S. solely did any of this. With Rwanda and
Congo, that deal has been criticized in part because it was driven largely
by Trump’s interest in Congolese minerals. So the peace deal that was reached
there mostly just guarantees that the U.S. can continue to take whatever it
wants from Congo.
Saying
that the Israeli-Iran conflict is resolved is remarkable to me because (1) the
president risked entering the country into a world war by sending U.S. bombers
into Iran and (2) this is Israel and Iran that we’re talking about. This
is hardly a settled issue, and it’s one that I think threatens to blow up again
in a few months. I think people have already forgotten the fact that the U.S.
intelligence assessment of the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities is that
[it] set the program back by months. So it’s very, very easy to assume that
this will pop up again in a couple of months. Serbia and Kosovo, that’s
obviously a long-standing problem—but again, the U.S. has made that conflict
more difficult. It’s long supported Kosovar independence efforts. Richard
Grenell, who’s a special envoy there, made that much more difficult. Trump
claiming to have settled the India-Pakistan dispute—also crazy because again,
it’s India and Pakistan we’re talking about. And also, this is a claim
that India’s own defense minister has rejected.
I
think a lot of these places Trump has injected himself into existing
geopolitical conflicts and either claimed credit for short-term ceasefires or,
in many cases, made them worse. And then when it stopped, he claimed credit for
it. And again, to go back to the very beginning, I think all of this is small
potatoes. These are things that have bubbled over since the start of his
presidency, but there are two main conflicts that he promised to resolve:
Russia-Ukraine and the Israel-Hamas war. And in both cases, the situations are
vastly worse on both humanitarian grounds and in terms of resolving the
conflicts. It’s a disaster.
Sargent: It absolutely is. I want to home in on Leavitt’s weird talk
about the Nobel Peace Prize because I think it gets at some of what we’re
talking about here. When she does that kind of thing, it’s so
visibly directed at the audience of one. That’s what gets me about it.
It’s so obviously done solely to make Trump feel good—because there’s not
another human being on this earth that’s going to take that ridiculousness
seriously except for maybe the most hard-core of Trump supporters. And yet at
the same time, that display just reminds everyone that the emperor has no
clothes, as I said earlier, right? Because it’s so obsequious and it’s so
disconnected from reality. What do they think they’re doing when they do
that kind of thing?
Shephard: One of the things that jumped out to me about this is this
realization that the way that this administration communicates with the public
is that Trump—over the course of the campaign usually, but sometimes over the
course of his presidency—just says a lot of stuff. And those markers will be,
in this case, I’m going to stop the Russia-Ukraine war on day
one, [and] the implication there being, I’m going to be a
Nobel Peace Prize–worthy president. And even though he doesn’t
ever, ever fulfill any of these promises, the job of Karoline
Leavitt is to go and say that he did anyway and to just make up material to
support all of that. And again, the overall goal here is to sate the ego of
this person who’s obsessed with the fact that Barack Obama, the first Black
president of the United States, won the Nobel Peace Prize—also for ridiculous
reasons. But I think that all that he wants is to have this thing that his
Black predecessor got and he doesn’t have.
Sargent: Well, remember when Joy Behar on The View went
out there and just tore him to pieces, that was the essence of it. It was his
jealousy of Obama that was at issue. And of course, the White House really went
right out there and essentially said, OK, we’re now going to use state
power to punish The View for daring to say that about Dear
Leader. This is another example of them just making it all so much
worse by making it clear to the whole world that everything is about
ministering to his pathologies. That’s just always what everything revolves
around at all times.
Shephard: Well, the other issue here too is that.… I am a critic of a
lot of American state power, but the idea that Trump can go around and just
insert himself into various conflicts with the goal of creating something
that he can present to the Nobel Prize Committee … I think a lot of the list of
conflicts there are things that the U.S. would have a normal role, as a
imperial power, essentially, to try to cool down. But Trump himself is
injecting himself into these things. You talk to people that are involved in the
Kosovar peace process, [and] they’re saying, He’s making our life a lot
harder. He’s not doing it because he wants the world to be safer. He’s
doing it because he wants to go to Sweden. It’s crazy.
Sargent: It sure is. I want to return to those Gallup identification
numbers, because they really raise some important issues. Again, it showed that
Democrats have regained their advantage in party identification. Forty-six
percent now identify as Democrats, while 43 percent identify as Republicans.
That’s flipped from the end of last year when Republicans led 47 to 43 percent
at the start of Trump’s term. Trump’s term has flipped these numbers. It’s
funny. I remember that when Republicans had that lead, there was this
tremendous amount of attention paid to it. It was another nail in the
Democratic Party’s coffin. Now you’re not hearing much talk about this.
I
got to say, I just don’t think that the press is comfortable telling the full
truth about Trump’s unpopularity. There’s this weirdly baked-in default
position of treating Trump as somehow Teflon. I think a Democratic
pollster was quoted saying that Trump is Teflon the other day. I mean, what the
fuck was that guy thinking? And it reminds me a lot of the way George W. Bush
was treated in 2005 and 2006. People who have been following this stuff for
a a really woefully long time, like you and I have, may remember that at
that time, George W. Bush was described constantly as a popular war president.
And it didn’t matter what the numbers actually showed, right? They just kept
dipping and dipping, and this was just a media thing that could not be shaken.
I feel like we’re in a bit of a similar position right now, do you?
Shephard: Yeah. It feels to me like an overcorrection from the first
term, to some extent. Trump has always been treated in this way,
but there’s a condescending quality to me—that essentially they treat his
support as, I should say, ineffable, almost as something that can’t be
computed, right? That there’s just this connection—innate connection—that he
has with his voters, and that it’s mysterious and magical. It’s the way that
Trump talks about it. And this is why I think it’s ridiculous when you would
always have the “diner pieces” or whatever—and it’s always some guy with shiny
shoes and fancy shirt, and he goes and talks to the real people. And
Trump’s connection to these people is not absolute, right? It’s still a
relatively small percentage of voters; again, most of them white. And I think
the other aspect of this—people don’t talk about as much as well either—is how
racialized it is, right? The press does not treat a Democratic coalition, which
is much more diverse and much more working class, for that matter, with the
same degree of deference. It’s because, and I think that this goes back to
your point with George W. Bush, as well, of the perception that it’s white
working-class voters, specifically, that it’s treated this way.
Sargent: Yeah, and I just want to return to those Gallup numbers for
a second showing that Democrats have regained their advantage in party ID. What
that really shows is that the fundamentals of how our politics works are
kicking in. And that’s something that I think a lot of people can’t get their
heads around. This idea that Trump just doesn’t defy all the rules of
politics. The party that’s out of power is gaining ground now—just the way it’s
happened in just about every midterm, except when there’s something really
unique and out of the ordinary. This is really something that I think a lot of
Democrats in particular have trouble accepting: that the rules apply to Trump.
Shephard: Yeah. The story of Trump is always that—he does it
successfully, and it’s the one thing that he does very well, right?—he
campaigns as a guy who says, You see all these other people, I’m
different from them. I’m more like you. I understand what your issues are. I’m
not in it for myself, or, to the extent that I’m in it for myself, it’s good,
right? It’s a different type of corruption. And I think that a
lot of people who are understandably fed up with both parties in America
look at Trump as something else, right? And I think that, again, Democratic
attacks that other Trump as an authoritarian, fascistic force—although they’re
accurate, occasionally [they] have the effect of reinforcing that. But in
office, the story has always been that he governs, for the most part, with the
bog-standard Republican approach that people hate. He also does a lot of authoritarian
and fascist stuff too. But the idea in the press in particular, and you hear it
from other Democrats as well, is that somehow he has the magic campaign touch
all the time. It’s just not true. And voters reject it.
And
again, what you’re seeing here, to point back to the numbers I talked about at
the top, is that the voters who were taken in by that argument—that he’s
different, that he’s going to govern in a different way—have all gone away.
It’s why I think the Epstein story is actually significant. It’s a story that
shows that Trump is actually like everybody else. He’s in it to protect
himself, to protect his own buddies. He’s in it for craven and corrupt
personal reasons, because he’s depraved.
Sargent: A hundred percent. And the mention of the authoritarianism
and fascism is important too because there’s this weird irony around that. It
works like this: The authoritarianism and fascism is actually, believe it or
not, making him unpopular. People don’t like that stuff. And yet at the same
time, those things make it harder for a lot of people to accept that Trump’s
unpopular. When the polls come out, when you tweet out a poll showing him
tanking, a thousand people just tweet at you, LOL, dictators don’t care
about being unpopular. People simply assume it doesn’t matter if he’s
unpopular. There’s this tendency to default to this idea that Trump is
invincible, right? Either elections will be just canceled or they’ll just be
rigged beyond hope. Either way, the central thought is that he has in some
sense fundamentally won permanently, right? But there are going to be midterms.
I don’t think he’s going to be able to rig them, at least to the degree that
he’d like. And people need to start realizing that he wants you to think that
he’s invincible so you give up on politics. What do you think, Alex? Am I being
too optimistic here?
Shephard: No, no. I’m generally our resident cynic, but I feel
fairly, fairly similarly right now. Even if Texas is able to succeed with this
radical and insane gerrymandering process, the Democrats are in very good
shape. And they’re in it because people are fed up on basically every front of
this administration. And I think this was not really true in the first term.
There was a grace period for Trump’s second term where I think the general
public was open to whatever it was that he was going to do. And six months in,
it’s very, very clear that there’s been a wholesale rejection on more or less
every front. And again, dictators care quite a bit about being popular.
Eventually they will create a situation in which they close themselves off from
public opinion. But this is a president that cares very, very deeply about
that.
And
I think the other reason why it matters is that the other big story of this
term for me is that … the first Trump term, I was very mean to people like
Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, Republicans who very tepidly opposed the president,
but they did help block his legislative agenda in ways that were ultimately
meaningful on the grand scale. That front doesn’t really exist in the current
Congress—but I do think if you continue to see the downfall in public opinion,
there are going to be Republicans that are going to have to look very
seriously at becoming more of a blocking force. Or again, if you look at
things like the Epstein files, right? That’s a very easy way for Republicans to
go against the president and satisfy their base at the same time. Eighty
percent of the base wants those files released.
Sargent: Yeah, you’d think that that would be a way. Just to close
this out. What do you think happens to Trump’s coalition over the next year
into the midterms? You went through some data showing that the coalition is
falling apart and fracturing. Does it get worse, and how does that happen?
Shephard: Yeah, we have data about this already. One thing that the
press does underestimate are the voters that just turn out for Trump—who do
exist; they’re real voters, and they only vote for Trump—but they don’t vote in
the midterm elections. And every time there are off-year elections, the press
is always waiting with bated breath to see if the Trump coalition will show up.
They never do. Trump isn’t on the ballot. And I think that the question
here for Democrats is going to be—it’s probably enough, frankly, for those
voters just to stay home—but I think the question here is that there’s an
opportunity for them to rebuild trust with communities that, again, I think
rightly held the Democrats accountable for taking them for granted. There’s an
opportunity there to change the way that they talk to minority communities,
particularly to Hispanic and Latino voters, in a way that I think is very,
very interesting.
It’s
a generational opportunity for the party. But again, you look at the last month
and you would say, What could Donald Trump do to possibly bring these voters
back? And I think that he’s starting to think about this too, which is why you
start to see ridiculous ideas like cutting checks getting floated around.
Sargent: Yeah. And the tariffs and the immigration crackdown are
really perfectly suited to start rebuilding that trust with those
constituencies that you’re talking about, working-class constituencies, for
Democrats. Alex Shephard, always great to talk to you, man. Thanks for all
this.
Shephard: Yeah, you too. Appreciate it.
Sargent: Folks, a quick announcement: We are taking a couple weeks
off, and the podcast will be down. We will be back the week of August 18. Can’t
wait to see you there. Take care.
The Daily Blast with Greg Sargent
